IDAG
Independent Distributed Art Galleries (IDAGs) is an idea for a new way to post and maintain galleries of art online in an independent, distributed fashion. This is in contrast to traditional art gallery sites like DeviantArt and FurAffinity, which maintain all your data on their private servers. This is great from an ease-of-use standpoint, but frustrating when it comes to data-privacy and mercurial moderation practices. Additionally, as those sites gain popularity, they will inevitably be (and many have been) bought, monetized, and destroyed in an effort to squeeze out shareholder value at the expense of the artist and general user experience. IDAGs are a plan for a new path forward to maintain ownership of your data (art), while still being a part of an interconnected and social art community.
IDAG Ecosystem[edit | edit source]
An ideal IDAG ecosystem works as follows:
- Your art, and the gallery software for viewing it, are stored on a server that you own or share with someone you trust.
- When you upload art to your gallery, one or several RSS/Atom feeds are updated.
- People who subscribe to your gallery's RSS/Atom feed get notified when you post something new.
- With RSS/Atom feed readers, viewers can subscribe to as many IDAGs as they want, getting feeds full of their favorite artists' posts!
Thus, artists can easily post their art to their own sites that they have complete functional / aesthetic / editorial control over, and users can subscribe to and get notifications and custom feeds for all their favorite artists!
But Hosting My Own Site is Hard![edit | edit source]
Ah! The point of the IDAG Project is to make this as simple as possible, both for artists and viewers. While it is more complicated that simply posting to Twitter or FurAffinity, it is likely much easier than you imagine. The precise details are still up in the air at the moment, but we are actively exploring the easiest and quickest ways to setup interoperable IDAGs and feed readers, and are finding many promising options.
For more details, see the article on Setting up a IDAG.